Fraternity-Testvériség, 1959 (37. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1959-04-01 / 4. szám
FRATERNITY 5 day he could be seen at a Buda coffee-house window surrounded and lionized by students, young admiring artists, journalists and politicians. This life kept him in too close a relation to the trivial affairs of the day. But whenever he managed to escape to the country or abroad, as he did in 1924 and 1928, the artist within flourished again and the distance from the daily round improved the quality of his writings. Unfortunately, he had no Weimar or Yasnaya Polyana to which he could repair unmolested by politicians or creditors, while constant conflict with his publishers who took advantage of his weaknesses and cheated him, increased his bitterness. At the same time clouds were darkening the political horizon, and he could hear the approaching steps of Nazism and World War II. Refusing any dealings with extremists either of the right or left, he withdrew to his library and wrote his final masterpiece — his autobiography. This is much more than a recounting of an artist’s life. It is a biography of an age by a great narrator. To the famous autobiographies of world literature — Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Goethe, Tolstoy, Proust, Gorki — another Confession has been added. The first volume was published in 1944, “From Cradle to Budapest”, but, as we have noted, more than 2,000 additional pages of this manuscript were found at his death-bed. After the siege of Budapest he was temporarily buried in a public park awaiting final decision of the City of Budapest. In his last will he had expressed the wish to be buried at the top of the Saint Gellért hill overlooking the capital and the Danube, but this was refused by the communist-dominated City Council. However, in 1949, a plot was granted him in the Budapest National Cemetery where Kossuth and most of Hungary’s immortals rest. Copyright of his works was left by the author to the three-century- old Calvinist College of Kolozsvár where he received his education. Under the communist regime, however, this denominational college was suppressed, the works of Dezső Szabó confiscated and their publication forbidden, mainly because they saw in his works a fervent defense of national independence based on a free peasantry, on the Danish model which is opposed to communist doctrines. Shortly after the 1956 October revolution, a volume of his writings was allowed to be printed and was picked up in 40.000 copies within a few days. Then the Iron Curtain fell again and his works were put back on the communist index. Some writers, even communists, tried to defend him, and a vigorous discussion ensued in the literary periodicals on his revaluation. Finally, the Communist Party intervened, put some of his defenders in prison and officially took a stand against the publication of his books. An eminent Hngarian writer, Cs. László Szabó, alluded in the London B. B. C. to Dezső Szabó’s case as the Hungarian Pasternak affair. His mastery as a novelist was acknowledged even by communist critics. But because of his ideological and political views unfavorable to the Marxist regime his works are on the communist index and circulate in Hungary underground. It is to be regretted that very little has as yet been translated of his writings into Western languages. The author himself, who had a good knowledge of six world languages, did not permit the publication
